WE BEGIN THIS CHAPTER with procedures we suggest can be used in
critiquing research. Then we offer actual examples of research pub-
lished in the disciplines of education and counseling, contextualizing
them within the continuum so that their validity can be evaluated.
The process of critiquing each study involves assessing the meth-
ods the researchers use. The methods, you will recall, we present in
Figure 3. The totality of the "methods" we call the design. When cri-
tiquing a published study, one is limited to knowing only what is writ-
ten in the article about the methods the researcher uses. Full
accounting for each activity on the part of the researcher may or may
not be included. Our judgments about each of these studies are lim-
ited, therefore, as are all critiques of published work.

More important than the conclusions we draw about these four stud-
ies is the process we suggest. Others may ask somewhat different ques-
tions about each study. We are not particularly bothered by that. In
fact, our questions here are not uniform from study to study. The bot-
tom line for us is advocating for a critique of published research that
seeks to judge whether the research question is consistent with the re-
search methods. Our process is only one of several that can accomplish
that goal.

After reading chapter 5, the reader should be able to

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